The study of religious or heroic legends and tales. One constant rule of mythology is that whatever happens amongst the gods or other mythical beings was in one sense or another a reflection of events on earth. Recorded myths and legends, perhaps preserved in literature or folklore, have an immediate interest to archaeology in trying to unravel the nature and meaning of ancient events and traditions.

Yeah, I've used that one on my Hockey Boards, Rich. We've got a guy there who fits that graphic to a tee.

Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed.

The only thing I'd add to seeker's description is that minimalism sees the whole region of Canaan as a collection of independent states/communities sharing a common culture...much like ancient Greece. The religious trappings were written into the story by later writers and then edited to suit later rulers. These were polytheistic or at best henotheistic societies until sometime after Cyrus sent the so-called "Exiles" back from Babylon.

Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed.

I'm kind of up in the air on that part, Min. I think that there may have been an Israel though it probably wasn't much like the bible's depiction. My suspicion is that Israel was based on the Aramaean model, a loose confederation of a handful of city states. I suppose that is really a minor difference when you get down to it. The key here is that the history, like the religion, was imposed rather than a reflection of what actually happened.

The Greeks spoke Greek and worshipped the Olympian gods...and they spent a lot of time fighting each other.

The Canaanites seem to speak Aramaic, seem to worship the Canaanite pantheon (with the possibility that individual gods had precedence in different towns) and seemed to spend a lot of time fighting each other.

Close enough for government work.

Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed.

Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed.

Further to this, there's a site to which I am eternally grateful for its onlining of a certain old conquest era document, which includes jpegs of original pages with accompanying English translations from Spanish texts which (unfortunately) even I noticed was in error (the translation accounted for roughly one third of the actual text, thus missing out several important points)...

W/A, I translated an original Spanish text from the Huntington Library in California with my father-in-law (a full Quechua) about a decade ago. It dealt with a military expedition of Capitan Gabriel Moraga of the Santa Barbara Presidio to our area in 1819 to punish the Mojave Indians. Our local, "expert" historian wrote a book about the expedition that totally contradicted the translation. All we could figure was that he was making things up and telling people what they wanted to hear. If he is ever used as a reference in the future, those references will be just as worthless.